Still Connecting: New Steve Jobs Tales Keep Surfacing

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once said that “One of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.” It became the opening quote of a posthumously curated memoir published online in 2023.

But last month saw still more reminders that Steve Jobs’ legend continues glowing for those who admired his work from afar — and from those who knew him. One by one, their memories surfaced again online in May. And collectively, all these stories together combine into their own “something wonderful” tribute.

Humanity had wanted to show some appreciation back…

October 5, 2011

On the day Steve Jobs died, Apple created a special page titled “Remembering Steve” (at apple.com/SteveJobs) with testimonials from “Over a million people from all over the world…” Even the satirical “Fake Steve Jobs” site posted a sincere and earnest poem of appreciation. (“Your greatest accomplishment is what you did to us. You gave us joy…”)

But on that day, thoughts of Steve Jobs seemed to be swirling throughout the entire culture, and even my own friends on Facebook wanted to share their own feelings about Steve Jobs.

“I tend to think of him as ‘Uncle Steve, ’” wrote one friend who’d worked at Pixar. “That is what a lot of us called him at Pixar while I was there, because Uncle Steve took care of us.

“And when I did see him around Pixar, more often than not he was smiling and seemed happy… Good job, Uncle Steve.”

And my friend Tom — a motorcycling enthusiast — shared that famous 1981 photo of a 26-year-old Steve Jobs riding a motorcycle.

“Ride on, Steve,” Tom posted. “You’ll be missed…”

‘Great idea, thank you.’ — Steve Jobs

That urge for everyday people to share their own treasured memories never really went away. It’s been nearly 14 years, and one person still fondly remembering is Steve Hayman. He’d been hired at a NeXT sales office in Toronto back in 1991, where he’d worked for five years in a field engineering position on their sales team. In that position he’d “help customers set up NeXT networks, build their own apps, relay their concerns back to headquarters in Redwood City…” Hayman writes on his blog. NeXT had a total of three employees in all of Canada, Hayman posted later, “and I think NeXT had about 400 people total.”

But this led to a funny encounter with Steve Jobs that he holds dear to this day… NeXT’s default email addresses were first initial + last name, but Hayman had wanted one of those cool first-name-only addresses he’d seen some co-workers using, and requested it on NeXT’s internal form (which granted his request automatically). And so, innocently enough, NeXT employee Steve Hayman had become [email protected]…

“That was a bad idea…” remembered Steve Hayman.

Steve Jobs was often assumed to have the address [email protected], and soon “I’m getting email from reporters, from other CEOs, from finance people…” Creating this email address that hadn’t existed before just made things worse, since “ordinarily it would have bounced back and they’d realize they’d mistyped the address.” Hayman returned to the internal form that assigned email addresses, and re-assigned [email protected] to [email protected] — then sent an apologetic email to Mr. Jobs himself explaining the whole situation.

“Hi – I’m new here. I did something dumb and set up a mail alias…” His email ended with “My apologies. Signed, new guy.”

And the end of this story, Hayman says, is “a reply I will cherish… the only email I ever personally received from Steve Jobs.” The great man had sent the Toronto-based systems engineer his four-word response. From somewhere in Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs had written…

“Great idea, thank you.”

When Apple acquired NeXT in 1996, Hayman became an Apple senior consulting engineer, where he continued working for the next 29 years. In 2023 he looked back on “32 years of wonder, of fascination with new technology, of nagging impostor syndrome that I still don’t really understand a lot of it, and of excitement about what comes next.”

Finally, last month, Hayman announced his retirement. Hayman’s LinkedIn profile says he was “promoted to Apple customer.” And after receiving a congratulatory email from Apple CEO Tim Cook, it must’ve brought back that fond memory from 1991…

“I started my career with an email from Steve Jobs, and I ended with one from Tim Cook,” Hayman wrote. “I’ve been a pretty lucky guy.”

Another Email from Steve

Hayman shared some other memories — including how email on the NeXT Computer “was pretty amazing in 1991,” with embedded images and sound files. Every NeXT user found one welcome email in their inbox from Steve Jobs.

It included a sound file, which Hayman resurrected after 34 years, with the voice of Steve Jobs — delivering a friendly greeting from 1991.

“Hi, this is Steve Jobs! I want to welcome you to the NeXT world…”

Other Memories

There was one more heart-warming surprise. Hayman’s story went viral, bringing him more than 100,000 views.

And soon the feeling spread, and others began also spontaneously sharing their own tales of encountering Steve Jobs…

In a post on BlueSky, long-time tech professional John McGrath remembered trying to email [email protected] in 2011 — the last year of Jobs’ life — just to ask him if they’d ever consider adding haptic feedback to the iPhone. And Jobs had replied — “literally about 30 seconds later,” McGrath writes, calling it “a reply I’ll never forget.” So what did Jobs think of giving the iPhone haptic feedback?

“It gets real annoying real fast, so no.”

“His emails were always sharp,” wrote Apple blogger John Gruber last month, remembering Steve Jobs responding to a developer in 2010 (with a post from Gruber’s blog). “This was a not infrequent thing at the time,” Gruber writes, “where random users or developers would email Jobs, he’d write back with something pithy, and they’d post the exchange.”

Steve Jobs had called Gruber’s 2010 post “very insightful and not negative.” So last month, in honor of that memory, Gruber added Jobs’ phrase as a slogan below his logo. (He’d created a similar logo-with-slogan combo back in 2010, but stopped using it over a decade ago — and decided it was time to bring it back.)

Other memories of Steve Jobs flowed in a May discussion on Hacker News. There were some quick stories from Apple Writer creator Paul Lutus, while another Hacker News commenter shared a second-hand story that seemed just as fondly cherished.

“I once knew a guy who had a framed snail-mail letter from Steve Jobs, asking if he’d reconsider his decision to not accept a job offer from Apple.”

A Second Encounter With Steve

Last month Hayman’s story also got a write-up in tech news site NewsBytes (“He took Steve Jobs’ email alias — What happened next surprised him.”). And Hayman’s memory even ultimately turned up in Google’s “AI Overview” for the topic [email protected] — though in a 2025 twist, this modern-day technology bungled some key details. (It mistakenly said that the address was originally assigned to “presumably the real Steve Jobs,” who “was concerned about the misdirected email and began panicking…”)

But “I think everybody that worked at NeXT had a Steve Jobs story,” Hayman wrote later, adding “now that I think about it, I have a few more.” In a follow-up blog post, Hayman remembers the entire NeXT field sales organization flying to Napa Valley for a retreat — “20 or so field engineers, another 20 or so account executives, various VPs, some support folks and more” — where Jobs gave a speech.

But that night at the bar, Steve Jobs sat right down at the bar’s piano “and started noodling around… just a chord here, a chord there, a few little jazzy progressions.”

So Hayman strolled up to the piano — “I decided I should say something” — and he’d said to Steve Jobs….

“Don’t quit your day job.”

That’s the entire story, except for answering the inevitable unasked question: What was Steve Jobs’ reaction?

“He laughed,” Hayman writes.

Adding, presumably in response to the other obvious unasked question, that no, Jobs “did not fire me on the spot.”

‘Something Transmitted There’

This year, California chose Steve Jobs as their nominee for the U.S. Mint’s “American Innovation” coins, a series of $1 coins honoring innovators from each state.

But maybe it’s fitting that, from the personal computing culture he helped shaped, comes another collective tribute, rising up from the grass roots — from all of the people he met along the way.

It’s the mirror image of the way Steve Jobs himself had felt about all of those people that he was making something wonderful for. “And you never meet the people,” Jobs says in his famous quote. “You never shake their hands…

“But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there.

“And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation.”